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Data centers in space makes no sense

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Re: Data centers in space makes no sense

#951

Post by timmit »

beloch wrote: post #115

I would not assume cooling has been worked out. Space is a vacuum. i.e. The lack-of-a-thing that makes a thermos great at keeping your drink hot. A satellite is, if nothing else, a fantastic thermos. A data center in space would necessarily rely completely on cooling by radiation, unlike a terrestrial data center that can make use of convection and conduction. You can't just pipe heat out into the atmosphere or build…

This is my 2 cents, I have an engineer background, not space science background.

At earth or above sea, we use cooling to maintain the temperature below 60 degrees, or 80 or 100 or something.

Shadow of space is -157 degrees, the cooling design will be different.

Re: Data centers in space makes no sense

#952

Post by scottyah »

wat10000 wrote: post #290
scottyah wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are several companies working on this, and the first generation tech is already proven, working in space on the ISS. Even Paul G is on board. https://x.com/paulg/status/2009686627506065779?s=20

Of course it's working . We've had computers operating in space for decades. There's no doubt it can be done. The question isn't whether it's possible, the question is why you'd do it just for data centers. We put computers in space because they're needed to do things that can only be done from there. Data centers work just fine on the ground. What's so great about data centers in space that makes them worth the imme…

From what I gather, space beats ground because of permitting processes, land costs, electricity costs, etc. Containers would be cool, but energy and connectivity would be the problem there. Deploying in space gives you:

- Full blown solar (no atmosphere in the way)

- 24/7 solar power

- Almost no regulations or dealing with other humans/threats (pirates go after container ships, what would they do if millions of dollars of CPUs were floating around?)

- very stable, proven comm links (ships would be going through satellite anyway)

All you have to do is figure out cooling, pay for transport, and the fun problem of docking/attaching. Also shielding will probably be a bigger issue than they think, you can't just put a normal chip up in space because the magnetosphere and atmosphere do crazy amounts of shielding that don't really work in the small scale. I assume the GPUs would need a lot more fault tolerance.

Re: Data centers in space makes no sense

#953

Post by kentm »

bunderbunder wrote: post #245
croddin wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Starlink and Falcon 9 have been an excellent pairing, Falcon 9 partially reusable rockets created a lot launch capacity and starlink filled the demand. Starship if it meets its goals will create more launch fully reusable supply by orders of magnitude, but there is not the demand for all that launch capacity. Starlink can take some of it but probably not all so they need to find a customer to fill it in order to buil…

Going to Mars is not a serious goal. We can tell because it’s not being treated as a serious goal. 100% of the focus is on the big vroom vroom part that’s really exciting to kids who get particularly excited by things that go vroom, and approximately 0% of the focus is on developing all the less glamorous but equally essential components of a successful Mars mission, like making sure the crew stays healthy.

As much as I'd like to see boots on the ground on Mars this is where I'm at. In my uneducated opinion, while building the massive rocket is incredibly difficult, its probably the easiest part of a Mars mission.

Re: Data centers in space makes no sense

#955

Post by shagie »

2001zhaozhao wrote: post #954

I was gonna say it is good for low-ping game servers, but then I remembered that the data center would literally be orbiting around the planet and ping would fluctuate by tens of milliseconds every few minutes.

It's worse than that (in terms of ping) because the typical "we get 100% solar" means that it's in a polar orbit over the dawn/dusk terminator ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun-synchronous_orbit ).

During the day or night, it will never be overhead.

Re: Data centers in space makes no sense

#956

Post by trimethylpurine »

valec wrote: post #844
trimethylpurine wrote: post #677

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can't exchange heat with vacuum If you put a pipe with hot gas inside, in space, it will get colder by convection. Blow air through the pipe.

ok. your pipe is full. now what

Don't make it full. Pipes are hollow by definition.

Re: Data centers in space makes no sense

#957

Post by RGamma »

elamje wrote: post #353

I was talking to someone about this the other day. I was part of a team at NASA that developed a cooling system for the ISS and this whole premise makes no sense to me. 1. Getting things to space is incredibly expensive 2. Ingress/egress are almost always a major bottleneck - how is bandwidth cheaper in space? 3. Chips must be “Rad-hard” - that is do more error correcting from ionizing radiation - there were entire t…

Think Elon: A swarm of advanced AIs working from space, untouchable for most, steering execution of his power fantasy on earth. And if not he has military goons to sell it to.

The technical discussions here are distractions to the avoid dealing with the glaring dissonance that for the vast majority none of this will improve life on earth.

Re: Data centers in space makes no sense

#958

Post by PinkiesBrain »

sfink wrote: post #137
aunty_helen wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The equation has a ^4 to the temperature. If you raise the temperature of your radiator by ~50 degrees you double its emission capacity. This is well within the range of specialised phase change compressors, aka fancy air conditioning pumps. Next up in the equation is surface emissivity which we’ve got a lot of experience in the automotive sector. And finally surface area, once again, getting quite good here with nan…

> And finally surface area, once again, getting quite good here with nanotechnology. So your hot thing is radiating directly onto the next hot thing over, the one that also needs to cool down?

The inner side of the radiator would be metallized, an anti black body. Together with a bit of vacuum it would thermally be quite far from the PV&GPU. Thermal insulation is easy in space.

Re: Data centers in space makes no sense

#959

Post by hdgvhicv »

DalasNoin wrote: post #683
hdgvhicv wrote: post #510

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The solar labels are in the sun. Behind them they are in the shade.

The energy collected from the solar panels must be converted into heat in the AI chips. It's really like putting the AI chips directly into the sun, just with extra steps. Sunlight gets transformed into electricity which gets transformed into heat in the chips.

So the satelite receives say 13kW of heat energy as it has a 10 square metre surface facing the sun.

That is converted to 2.5kW electic and 10.5kW heat. The electric is then used to power the computer and ply doom or whatever. That 2.5kW of electric is then converted to 2.5kW of heat. That means the satelite has to dissipate 13kW of heat.

But even without the electric use it still receives 13kW of heat and dissipates 13kW of heat.

Any object in space will emit as much energy via radiation as it receives otherwise it will continue to increase in temperature. The question is thus what temperature does it sit at to make this in equilibrium.

If the satelite was perfectly flat it would run at 120c for a black body. If it was a lump of stew it would be about 150c.

To reduce that to 20C you need about 50sqm radistor, or 5 times the surface area in shadow. The shadow is about 350-400m long

So you build it as a cone with the flat circular area facing the sun and the pointy area in its shadow you’d only need a cone height of about 20m to emit enough heat to keep the satelite to room temperature.

Re: Data centers in space makes no sense

#960

Post by imtringued »

ineedasername wrote: post #829
kimixa wrote: post #687

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Output from radiating heat scales with area it can dissipate from. Lots of small satellites have a much higher ratio than fewer larger satellites. Cooling 10k separate objects is orders of magnitude easier than 10 objects at 1000x the power use, even if the total power output is the same. Distributing useful work over so many small objects is a very hard problem, and not even shown to be possible at useful scales for…

Why would they bother to build space data center in such monolithic massive structures at all? Direct cables between semi-independent units the size of a star link v2 satellite. That satellite size is large enough to encompass a typical 42U server rack even without much physical reconfiguration. It doesn't need to be "warehouse sized building, but in space", and neither does it have to be countless objects kilometers…

Congratulations! You have formed a fabric made out of satellites. You better hope it doesn't crumple.
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